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Topic: Specialist (Read 402 times)

Recently I posted a video of a golfer who makes a living just hitting long drives. He mentioned back problems about 3 times in the 5 minutes I talked with him. I was talking with his handler and asked him how the rest of his game was. "His chipping and putting is mediocre, he won't work on his short game because he's so good with the drives."

Several years ago my deadlift was terrible and I focused on it until I got it up to a marginal level. I hated it because I was a bench "specialist." Turns out working on my weakest lift made me stronger on all my lifts.

How about you? Do you find yourself focusing on your strongest lifts, or your weakest ones?

Have no legs and always had a decent upper body plus strength. So the past 2 years I've been working on building up my legs from toothpicks to twigs. Prior to that I was still more focused on my stronger lifts but reading here and around the web came to realize if I could get my lower body stronger it would help my upper body.So, yes, I am focusing on my weakest parts now.

I *was* a deadlift specialist at the beginning. At the first meet I did with you guys, I had the worst squat at the meet with 155 and shocked the hell out of myself by deadlifting 300 It was always the lift that I could count on, the one that was the easiest, and the one that felt the best.

This past year has been hard though, because when my posterior chain turned into a pretzel, it took my deadlift down with it. That was soul crushing. But while my posterior chain has been compromised, my quads, which have always been quite weak in comparison, have really had to step up their game. I know I mentioned on ID's thread that I made the decision to hammer on front squats, and that has helped enormously. Bringing up my quads has allowed my back squat to stay more unscathed, as I just wound up turning it into an unusually quad-dominant low bar squat to get it the hell away from my jacked up posterior chain.

At the end of all of this, I actually think I'll wind up bringing a better package to the table, and I hope all of my lifts respond accordingly. My posterior chain is still in the process of being restored to it's (hopefully) former glory. My anterior chain will be substantially stronger than it has ever been. In the process of rehabbing, I've run across numerous weaknesses and imbalances, all of which are being addressed. And I'm working hard on better mind-muscle connection, which is letting me figure out when muscles aren't firing correctly so that they can be addressed immediately.

So this is an interesting science experiment, really. What happens when you take someone with an extremely strong posterior chain compared to a weak anterior chain, then absolutely force them to switch things around and bring up their weakest parts? The only thing keeping me sane with all the frigging unilateral and iso work I'm doing currently, is that I think I'm going to like how it turns out in the end